These are not your ordinary pies. These are high-brow pies made by Seattleite, Lauren Ko, whose full-time administrative job has her moonlighting as crafty pie designer for Loko Kitchen -- a "pie-only" Instagram account that practically garnered hundreds of followers overnight, thanks to Design Milk's spotlight.
Ko's most popular pie design is a divergence from the classic, fat-latticed apple pies you might've been used to growing up (no offense to grandmas). Intricate lattice strips twist and overlap, converging around a succulent morsel of cherries, creating a modernist filigree too beautiful to eat; it's the best that money can pie.
Instagram's abysmal appetite for "eye fodder" or "food porn" has pushed Loko Kitchen into the forefront of a whole microcosm of dedicated pie artists (or simply, bakers) that we never knew existed. People will always double-tap artistic food.
According to Grub Street, Brooklyn-based food photographer and cookbook author, Yossy Arefi, says that good-looking confections, like Ko's modernist pie design, have always been around, just like the of-the-moment hue, millennial pink. It wasn't until recently that our eyes were on the pies.
Carissa Waechter's namesake East Hampton bakery, which opened in 2016, focuses primarily on taste, but aesthetics ranks close to first. Carissa's blueberry pie-chart pies are especially worthy of likes; first, it's a pie chart within a pie; second, it's a bold design for pie, made with contrasting colors; third, it's made to look like four different slices of pie, which unravels the purpose of a pie chart; and fourth, "donut sugar."
Pie art is trending and even Martha Stewart jumped on the bandwagon, posting an autumn-inspired pie by German baker Karin Pfeiff Boschek made with pristine leaf and flower cutouts and peek-a-boo holes revealing a constellation of apple slices. It's the most liked photo on her Instagram since September. If Martha Stewart says so, then it must be true: pie decoration is now an art form.
So, if you're thinking of bringing a pedestrian, but "handsome" pie to Thanksgiving dinner this year … think again. A quick exploration through #pieart will force you to put some fractional effort into your guest's pies this year -- one that will have everyone standing on their feet, not in applause, but for a good angle; in this day and age -- it's kind of the same thing.